Card tells legacy of Bracero Program

U.S. need for workers during World War II led to decades of border crossings.

U.S. need for workers during World War II led to decades of border crossings.

July 29, 2008

Miguel Mendez's Alien Laborer's Identification Card -- dated Sept. 4, 1956 -- is now, to him, useless. Mendez, 77, has had a long relationship with this country. He and his children are either legal residents or citizens. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren are the sons and daughters of immigrants. The laminated card has Mendez's picture on it, the youthful face of a 25-year-old who was beginning to raise a family in his home community of Santiago Capitiro, Mexico, and who had just been recruited to work in a U.S. agricultural labor program whose workers were known as Braceros. The Bracero (from Spanish brazo or arm) Program that ran between the years of 1942 and 1964 was a guest worker program that supplied manual labor to U.S. agriculture and railroads. Pablo Ros Voces Latinas Pablo Ros writes a weekly feature for The Tribune. It helped the country fill a labor shortage that had been caused in part by its involvement in World War II. Mendez's Bracero ID card no longer has any value to the U.S. government, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told me. But it does in explaining this country's history of undocumented immigration. To Mendez, as well as to other Mexicans who have built new lives here, the Bracero Program was the beginning of their shared destinies. I met Mendez in Plymouth, where some of his relatives live. He shares his time between Plymouth and Santiago Capitiro in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico, a place he describes simply as "a small village." Mendez has lived off of the land his whole life. On the land he inherited, he grows corn, wheat and, among other things, some kinds of beans. To come here this year, he's left someone in charge. 2008 was the year for peanut. It was out of need, Mendez told me, that he joined the Bracero Program in 1956. In St. Louis, he picked cotton, up to 100 pounds a day, and earned $90 in three months. He told me he returned home feeling rich. Mendez said he chose to stay in Mexico. But more than two decades later, in 1979, one of his sons told him that he wished to seek his own fortune in the States. In that way, Mendez's son would join a migrant stream created in part by the Bracero Program. Mendez said he gave his son some of the money he needed to cross the border. Today, all of Mendez's children live in the States, in Indiana and Texas. He has 25 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. For decades after it was instituted, the Bracero Program -- which gave higher-paid but temporary work to Mexican laborers while helping the United States meet its labor shortage -- created a pattern of immigration that grew beyond government control. The Bracero Program created labor dependency on employers here and workers in Mexico that it couldn't satisfy because of its nature as a temporary guest worker program, said Gilberto Cardenas, director of the Institute of Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Instead, Braceros forced to return home ended up coming back across the border to the States without government permission, Cardenas told me. They and their employers here had come to rely upon their labor. To the workers, crossing illegally meant more mobility and less government abuse. Racism prevented the U.S. government from allowing Mexican immigrants to establish permanent lives here, Cardenas said, while creating an unfair system that ultimately led to high levels of undocumented immigration. Not only were former Braceros commuting between the two nations over time but others who had never made the journey here, upon hearing of this country's vast opportunities, were venturing forth. Although there was undocumented immigration before the Bracero Program, it was the politics of the program that created a steady, rising stream of illegal entries, a stream that continues to flow today. And so it's meaningful that even today Mendez carries his Bracero ID card in his wallet everywhere he goes. It's a reminder of where it all began.Staff writer Pablo Ros: pros@sbtinfo.com (574) 235-6112